An ankle-foot orthosis (AFO) with a plantarflexion resistance function, improves post-stroke gait. An AFO with a plantarflexion resistance function not only affects the first rocker function and the weight acceptance but also the late stance phase. Achilles tendon extension is important for ankle joint function and for forward propulsion during the late stance phase; however, the effect of an AFO with a plantarflexion resistance function on the Achilles tendon is unclear. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of plantarflexion resistance on the extension of the Achilles tendon and the forward-propulsive force. Herein, 10 healthy adult males participated who walked under three different conditions a no-AFO condition and two AFO conditions that had different levels of plantarflexion resistance (P1 and P2). The stiffness value of the P1 and P2 conditions was 0.56 and 1.47 Nm/°, respectively. A three-dimensional (3D) motion analysis system and a musculoskeletal model were used to assess the tendon-length change, the ground reaction force, kinematics, and kinetics data. The change in Achilles tendon length was significantly lower in the P1 and P2 conditions than the no-AFO condition. Furthermore, changes in the length of the Achilles tendon significantly decreased in the P2 condition when compared with that in the P1 condition. The peak anterior ground reaction force was significantly lower in the P2 condition than the no-AFO condition. These results suggest that excessive assist provided by an AFO prevents efficient gait by decreasing both the forward-propulsive force and tendon function.Texture is normally represented by aggregating local features based on the assumption of spatial homogeneity. Effective texture features are always the research focus even though both hand-crafted and deep learning approaches have been extensively investigated. Motivated by the success of Bilinear Convolutional Neural Networks (BCNNs) in fine-grained image recognition, we propose to incorporate the BCNN with the Pair-wise Difference Pooling (i.e. BCNN-PDP) for texture classification. The BCNN-PDP is built on top of a set of feature maps extracted at a convolutional layer of the pre-trained CNN. https://www.selleckchem.com/products/FK-506-(Tacrolimus).html Compared with the outer product used by the original BCNN feature set, the pair-wise difference not only captures the pair-wise relationship between two sets of features but also encodes the difference between each pair of features. Considering the importance of the gradient data to the representation of image structures, we further generalise the BCNN-PDP feature set to two sets of feature maps computed from the original image and its gradient magnitude map respectively, i.e. the Fused BCNN-PDP (F-BCNN-PDP) feature set. In addition, the BCNN-PDP can be applied to two different CNNs and is referred to as the Asymmetric BCNN-PDP (A-BCNN-PDP). The three PDP-based BCNN feature sets can also be extracted at multiple scales. Since the dimensionality of the BCNN feature vectors is very high, we propose a new yet simple Block-wise PCA (BPCA) method in order to derive more compact feature vectors. The proposed methods are tested on seven different datasets along with 21 baseline feature sets. The results show that the proposed feature sets are superior, or at least comparable, to their counterparts across different datasets.In mineral transportations, it is essential to measure the gas hydrate particle concentration to manage the risk of flowline blockage. Traditional single-frequency ultrasonic methods measure the particle concentration by treating the mixtures with an average particle size, which ignores the influence of the particle size distribution, and thus, measurement accuracy is limited. Therefore, this research studies the multifrequency ultrasound attenuation method to measure the particle concentration through the prior estimate of particle size distribution. First, considering the large particle size and low-density contrast characteristics of the hydrate-water dispersion, the influence of multiple scattering among particles cannot be ignored apart from the scattering attenuation caused by each particle, so the ultrasonic scattering attenuation mechanism considering multiple scattering effects is established to solve the attenuation prediction problem of the hydrate-water dispersion. Since the solution of the equation obtained by the ultrasonic attenuation model produces a Fredholm integral equation of the first kind, an inversion algorithm combining simulated annealing with genetic algorithm based on ultrasonic attenuation mechanism is proposed to solve the ill-posed problem in the inversion calculation of particle concentration. Finally, considering the characteristics of hydrate-water dispersion, the experiments were carried out with millimeter-sized acrylic spheres and saltwater as substitute materials of the hydrate-water dispersion. The results show that the method based on the multifrequency attenuation of ultrasound in the range 1-5 MHz has a good discrimination for the particle size, and the measurement error of particle concentration is less than 3% under different particle size distributions.Electric fields are ubiquitous throughout the body, playing important role in a multitude of biological processes including osteo-regeneration, cell signaling, nerve regeneration, cardiac function, and DNA replication. An increased understanding of the role of electric fields in the body has led to the development of devices for biomedical applications that incorporate electromagnetic fields as an intrinsically novel functionality (e.g., bioactuators, biosensors, cardiac/neural electrodes, and tissues scaffolds). However, in the majority of the aforementioned devices, an implanted power supply is necessary for operation, and therefore requires highly invasive procedures. Thus, the ability to apply electric fields in a minimally invasive manner to remote areas of the body remains a critical and unmet need. Here, we report on the potential of magnetoelectric (ME)-based composites to overcome this challenge. ME materials are capable of producing localized electric fields in response to an applied magnetic field, which the body is permeable to.